


Westchester, 1997

by neverknowsbest



Category: X-Men (Comicverse), X-Men (Movieverse), X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Domestic X-Men, F/F, F/M, alternative universe - 1990's, asexual Kurt Wagner, everybody else is bi or gay, friends to lovers to exes to something, is it really the x-men if no one dies or is sad all the time, or actually communicates, superhero soap opera, x-men more like lgbt-men
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-25
Updated: 2020-03-10
Packaged: 2020-05-19 08:10:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,176
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19352968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neverknowsbest/pseuds/neverknowsbest
Summary: Going home is hard.Kitty Pryde returns from five years of covert work in Japan to an Xavier School that's... just a school. Still a boarding school for mutant children, but that's it. Everyone in her life is different in one way or another. Some, maybe, for the better.This is about reconnecting and rebuilding a found family.





	1. 0 - to the place i belong

**Author's Note:**

> When I found out the '90s X-Men movie was going to be based on the Phoenix Saga, I was... not impressed. (The original is really good, I just don't need to see everybody do it over and over again.) So I decided to make my own AU to fill the void. I wasn't planning on sharing it with anybody, and then Dark Phoenix actually came out. 
> 
> so here's this instead. This is kind of a "prelude" chapter, so it's kind of short.
> 
> I have no update schedule because I'm an adult with a job, so please know it might be a while between chapters. 
> 
> Also, if you have any questions about headcanons or anything in this AU, hmu on tumblr or twitter at chawpstix and let me scream at you.

Going back home is… hard. Going back to anything is hard. It’s too easy to fall into a new routine, a new life, and then it shatters your brain to go back to the old one. Even if it’s better for you. Healthier.   
Even if it’s the right thing to do. 

March, 1997. I-95 between Queens and White Plains, NY.

A silver ‘89 Civic hatchback chugged its way up the interstate. Over the last half hour, the scenery had changed completely from brick and metal to large stretches of trees hiding gigantic, old money houses. A woman in her late twenties drove in almost complete silence, a low volume mixtape playing Liz Phair over the stereo. The drive felt familiar, but old and uncomfortable at the same time. Like stretching a newly healed bone. A questioning chirp came from the beaten up backpack in the passenger seat. “Sorry, buddy. You’re stuck in there for a few more minutes.”

The car turned off onto a long quiet road. After a few miles, it parked in front of an ostentatious house that looked more like one of those castles eccentric billionaires have moved brick-by-brick from Europe. Which was definitely the case.   
“We’re here.”

After ten minutes of debating turning around and going back to her friends’ apartment, the woman started the walk up to the giant front doors. With a sharp inhale, she finally knocked. 

Nothing.

She knocked again, harder this time. Still nothing. Just before she turned away to start the drive back to Queens, the door cracked slightly. Which was no small feat, considering it was solid hardwood and about eight feet tall. From the shadow of the door, she could make out a pair of yellow eyes almost seven feet from the ground. 

“K… Kitty? Is… Is that you?” A low but quiet voice came from the shadows. A blue, half-cat half-primate face followed, the yellow eyes shining behind a pair or gold-rimmed glasses.

“Hey, Hank.” She shrugged. “You don’t… have any empty rooms, do you?”


	2. 1 - you went away and can't come back

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Kitty finds out why the house is so quiet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey so here's the next chapter right away.
> 
> I'm not sure if Kitty will always be the POV character, but I'm working this out as I go :)

This was a mistake. I shouldn’t be here. This isn’t the same house I came to when I was sixteen. Shit, it’s not the same house from when I was 23. I don’t need to run to Saint Charles like a fucking kid anymore. But my parents don’t even know I’m in this hemisphere, let alone back in New York. I can’t go back to them now. It’s embarrassing.

Hank moved aside to let me in the front door, and I was half right. Everything looked exactly like it had five years ago. I had only been here a year that time, but I knew exactly where every door and hallway went. Where every jar in the kitchen was supposed to go, even if it didn’t make it back there. Even if it wasn’t the home I was expecting, or really wanted, I almost had more nostalgia for this dusty old hellhole than I did the house I grew up in.

“You mean, as a student? No offense, Kit, but you might be a little old to re-enroll,” Hank laughed as he picked up my suitcase. I knew better than to fight him on it. I lead the way down the well-traveled hallway to Charles’s office. “I don’t know if we have any completely empty rooms on the girls’ floor, but I’m sure we can get you something. When did you get back? The last I heard, you and Lo-”

“The girls’ floor? I’m almost 30, Hank. Are you seriously going to make me stay in the co-eds with the kids?” I wasn’t about to bunk with a teenager, but I also wasn’t really in a position to turn it down. “Don’t tell me The Actual X-Men have to stay in the same part of the house as the students? Aren’t Anne-Marie and Remy married now? How does that work? They’re both pretty, uh… energetic…”

I assumed Hank had stopped because we had finally reached the office door, but I heard my suitcase softly hit the floor.

“Kitty… didn’t anyone get in contact with you?” 

“With what, Hank? I’ve been on a completely different continent for five years,” I laughed as I turned to face him. Then, I noticed he wasn’t laughing with me.

“The X-Men are, um…” He let out a huge sigh, which I guess is really the only kind he could have. “They’re… gone.”

I felt the blood drain out of my face and my fight-or-flight felt like it was going to kick in any minute. “What. What’s wrong. What happened.” None of them came out like questions. I guess my face showed what I was thinking before I could even say it. Hank’s eyes got huge and his hands went up in a defensive stance as he realized what I had pieced together. 

“No! No, not like that! Sorry, that was a really poor choice of words.” He dragged a huge paw-hand across the top of his head. “They’re all fine! There was an… incident. The school was attacked. Again.” He moved past me to open the door. The same furniture that had always been there was still how I remembered it, but the room itself was just different enough to feel off. All of Charles’s personal stuff was gone. Every humanitarian award was replaced by a scientific one, every Oxford pennant replaced with MIT. “Only this time, we weren’t able to keep it a secret. The parents found out, and almost all of them threatened to pull their kids, and their tuition. Charles knew we couldn’t keep the school running and deploy the X-Men from here. So they left. Him, Scott, Maddie, Warren, Anne-Marie, Remy…” He moved to sit behind the massive oak desk, a replica of Charles’s but scaled up for Hank’s build. “... even Bobby,” he said, wistfully. “Charles thought it would be safest if we didn’t know where they were going, so they just… left.”

“Oh my god. Hank, I’m so sorry,” I whispered. I felt like a frog was stuck in my throat. “Holy shit… so they just… like that. Fuck.” I slumped back in the wingback chair I had slowly fallen into while I took everything in.

Hank straightened back up. “The good thing is, the school is still here. And we’re able to do what we were supposed to be doing in the first place.” He gestured at a wall of the office. “We’re keeping kids safe.” On the wall, there hung a class picture for every year the school had been open. 

The class size fluctuated, growing up to a huge class in 1994, then no more than ten in ‘95, then a few more last year. In ‘94, Charles and Hank had stood at the outer edges of the bottom row, with the X-Men dotted throughout the crowd. Scott and Madelyne, who was clearly pregnant that year, down near the bottom. Warren in the center back, to make room for his wings. Bobby, sliding on a sheet of ice like Burt Fucking Reynolds, in the center front. And all around them, kids of different ages, shapes, genders, races, colors (seriously, one kid was pink), all full of hope, never thinking a giant robot could step on the east wing. (Actually, was this one kid a robot? How do you have mutant robots?) The next year, almost every adult was missing. Hank was still there, but with a more somber face than the previous years. A woman I thought I recognized stood in the place where Charles had been in every other photo. I squinted until I could clearly make out her face.

“Is that… Moira?”

“Yeah, she moved here not long after you left, actually. She’s been helping me get the school back on its feet after… you know.”

“Big metal foot in the library?”

“Not this time. Surprisingly, this one wasn’t a physical attack. Mass hallucinations, migraines so strong kids’ noses and ears started bleeding. People started getting hurt. Hurting each other. We still don’t have a good idea of where it came from or from whom.”

“Oh. Well, shit.”  
“So, uh… that’s it right now. We’ve got about 35 kids here right now, and with Moira acting as the face of the school, we’ve got a lot more starting next term. We might be okay soon.” He turned to a beige computer monitor and started clicking around. “Okay, let’s get you a bed.” I watched Hank poke around various screens for a few minutes, typing furiously one second, then backspacing with the same intensity the next. Repeat, repeat. After some tedious clicking and a strongly furrowed brow, he smiled and sat up. “Here’s one! A student who moved here last year from California. Her roommate just graduated and she’s got a half-empty room.” He looked past the monitor at me with a half-grin. I wasn’t having it.

“Are you fucking kidding me, Henry? I can’t live with a teenage girl. Again, I’m probably twice this kid’s age, and I won’t do it.” I stood up, and made a move for my bag.

“That’s all we’ve got right now, Kitty. As soon as something opens up, I’ll try to get you a single room, but my primary focus right now is providing these children with a safe place to live. You can’t show up on my doorstep and ask me to put you before these kids.” Hank stood up, more intimidating than I had ever seen him look intentionally. “You have options. They don’t.”

Fuck.

“Okay.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> also just so this is up front, kitty isn't hooking up with a child. please don't look to me for ships between adults and children.


	3. 2 - i can't see you every night free

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Kitty makes some connections (socially and with a fist) and more tagged characters actually show up

Hank and I walked down the hall to one of the common rooms. It was early in the afternoon, but late enough that classes had ended and students were starting to gather around TVs or in their rooms. There were some obvious cliques (I saw that same robot kid with three boys, standing in a circle with Game Boys), but nothing too bad. I came to the school once as a kid. My parents passed it off as “summer camp” to the neighbors, but they had just gotten sick of me falling through the floor in my sleep. It was supposed to be a training camp. You know, “get the hang of this whole mutation… thing.” We went to space instead. My parents still don’t know about that.

 

“Miss Lee?” Hank called over the beeps and chirps of video games on the TV. The game paused (much to assorted protests), and a girl who couldn’t be older than 15 turned toward him. She was 5 feet tall if she was lucky, and dressed like one of those Delia’s catalogs had a baby with a Claire’s.

 

“What’s up?” The girl opened a soda as she approached us. She eyed me suspiciously as she drank her Pepsi.

 

“Jubilation, this is Kitty Pryde. She was a student here a… well, a while ago, and she served as one of the X-Men for a short time. She’s going to be your temporary roommate, now that Angelica’s graduated.” Hank tucked his hands behind his back and gave what was probably supposed to be a placating smile, if he wasn’t clearly sweating bullets. The girl (Jubilation? What the fuck kind of name is that?) drank more of her soda and made uncomfortable eye contact with me.

 

“Dope. Also, don’t call me that.” She stuck her hand out to shake mine, and I did the same. “It’s Jubilee,” she corrected, more to me than Hank. “My parents are first generation Americans, but my grandparents wanted me to have a Chinese name. So like, on my birth certificate, it’s  Huānténg. But I went to a bunch of private schools with white kids and white teachers, and like, my parents are a doctor and a lawyer so they wanted me to have a “real American school experience” or whatever. So they directly translated my name to English. And it sucks. So I told everyone to call me “Jubilee,” and my parents hate it, so everything worked out.” She gave me a shit-eating grin before she took another drink of her soda.

 

“Cool. I hate my name, too. I think we’re going to get along.”

 

That was the last moment I knew actual peace in that house. Everything afterward was a storm of shit and emotions I didn’t want to feel anymore. Any illusion of a quiet living situation shattered completely with one sound:

 

“Kitty?”

 

Until then, I hadn’t seen who Jubilee had been playing the Sega with. He had gotten up off the floor while we were being introduced. His hair should have been a dead giveaway. That fucking hair. A man (which, it’s important to know, is being way too generous) a few months older than me and a few inches taller, stood there in the same flannel shirt and old jeans I remembered. Peter Maximoff, the biggest dumbass I’ve ever known.  _ Is “nausea” an emotion, because I felt it. _ He started to cross the room toward us.

 

“Peter.”

 

“Holy shit, bab-”

 

I punched him in the jaw. He went down.

 

Hank, Jubilee, and literally every kid in the room stared at me. The Game Boy circle looked up from their group game of Tetris. They all looked confused, offended, or both.

 

“It’s fine,” I held up my hands to show that I wasn’t planning on hitting anyone or anything else. “He’ll be fine. Ex-boyfriend.”

 

Jubilee cackled and snorted like a gremlin. “She’s perfect.”

 

\---

 

Hank helped me get Peter down to the infirmary. And by “helped,” I mean “he slung Peter over his shoulder and I was also there.” The school nurse, a woman named Sharon, was out for a few days, so I offered to take care of him. And maybe find out why the hell he was there.

 

Peter woke up as cleaned the scrape on his forehead. “H...h-hey, Kitty.” He tried to do some grotesque wink/smile combination that just pulled the cut in the wrong direction.

 

“You’re gonna get blood in your eye if you keep doing that,” I said, keeping my face as straight as possible. Damn it. Even as mad as I was at him, as much as I could actually reach into his body and squeeze his lungs, he absolutely fucked me up. This idiot. This fucking hot, horny idiot.

 

“How - _ oww shit-  _ how’ve you been? It’s been, like… five years?” He winced as I put bactine on the cut.

 

“Six, actually.” I pushed the cotton ball into his forehead with more force than was really necessary.

We were both quiet for a minute. Until I lost my shit. 

 

“Are you fucking kidding me, Pete? How do you not know how long it’s been? We lived together, for shit’s sake. You don’t get to be cavalier about this. You’re not the one who woke up to a half-empty apartment. You didn’t have to go crawling to the Home for Wayward Mutants because you couldn’t afford rent on your own.” I had to stop to breathe and keep myself from crying. Not “sad crying.” The kind of crying that happens when you finally let a ton of pent-up emotion out and it’s like a pressure valve bursting. The last time I had seen Peter, we were going to sleep in the shitty studio apartment we rented together when we were 21. The next morning, he was gone, along with most of his stuff. No note. Nothing. We hadn’t seen each other since. I knew I’d probably kill him if I found him, and I suspected he thought the same thing. Now, here we were. In the same house, together. But at least this time, I had a fancy robot computer room to kick his ass in, and the skills with which to do it.

 

When I finally calmed down enough for my eyes to focus again, I realized Peter wouldn’t look at me. We sat like that for another minute, me staring daggers into his head, him desperately trying burn holes in the infirmary bench. He finally spoke up, quietly, still refusing to make eye contact.

 

“Do you hate me now?” He gave a half-hearted scoff. “I mean, you have the right to. Probably should.” He let out a sigh, and changed his gaze to the ceiling. “I don’t know why I did it. I’ve been trying not to think about it. Alison told me you moved to Japan with some short old guy, so I just kind of assumed I’d never see you again.” He finally looked… well, not at me, but more at the wall behind me. “All I can do right now is say I’m sorry.” He chewed on his bottom lip for a second, then did that thing where you puff your cheeks up, then huff all the air out at once. Peter had never been good at… feelings. Or at least talking about them. I don’t mean in that “turbo-masculine, men-don’t-cry” kind of way. He had a lot of feelings, and was really quick to act on them. He just had a lot of trouble trying to name them, or give explanations for why he did the things he did. 

 

I met Peter as a “problem kid” in 9th grade, when my parents made me sign up to be one of those bullshit Peer Counselors. They said it would look good on my college applications. (I went to community college, then fought supervillains, and I don’t think Sauron the Psychic-Vampire-Pteranodon really cared about my skills as a mediator). We were put together because “oh, isn’t it convenient that you’re both Jewish and, you know,  _ that other thing _ .” He wasn’t actually a bad guy. Just impulsive, blew off homework, used the fact that he could move at supersonic speed to cut class without anyone noticing. Normal shitty suburban kid stuff. His mom put him in normal counseling after his first suspension, and he officially got diagnosed with ADHD in 11th grade. My parents hated him and said he was a bad influence, which just made him even more likely to be my Official Boyfriend than he already was. I moved out at 18 and into an apartment with him. We scraped by, but everything worked out somehow. Until the day I woke up alone.

 

I sighed. “I really want to. I want to hate you until I die, then I want to haunt the shit out of you.” He laughed, and I had to gather every ounce of self control not to laugh with him. “I actually did hate you, for a really long time. It’s just… really hard to hate you when you’re right here.” 

 

Even without looking, I felt his eyebrows go up to make the smuggest face in the universe. “Oh,  _ really _ ?” He leaned in slightly, and I shoved back on his shoulder as I got up. He made a hiss as his head hit the bench.

 

“You’re in worse shape than I thought. You obviously have a concussion, because your brain bouncing off your fucking skull is the only way you could think you’re allowed in my personal space right now.”

 

“Fair,” he groaned.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you can't convince me Warlock could never function as a group link cable for multiple game boys


	4. 3 - outside a new day is dawning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which roommates start to bond, a backstory is hinted at, and Here Comes A Very Special Boy

Hank helped me get stuff from my car to the room I would be sharing with Jubilee. Not to be a cliche, but the rooms were smaller than I remembered. The last time I’d stayed here, the year I was Officially With The X-Men, I’d had a room to myself. The team’s rooms were (had been?) in a separate wing of the house. As far as I had learned, the non-students still living at the house were former or probationary members of the team and lived in rooms among the students. Peter had made sure to let me know where his room was. I was trying to make sure I forgot, and was failing.

 

“So, is your cat gonna, like, live in your backpack or what?”

 

I seriously forgot I wasn’t alone in the room. Jubilee had been surprisingly quiet for a while, chewing gum and reading a magazine.

 

“Uhh… sorry? My what? There’s nothing in my backpack that’s dumb why would I have a living thing in a bag that’d be _crazyyyyy…_ ”

 

She rolled her eyes at me. “Cut the crap, lady. There’s a pissed-off cat in your backpack. I’m not stupid.” She blew a bubble with her gum and popped it for emphasis. 

 

I sighed in resignation, and moved to the door to lock it. I turned back to Jubilee and tried to muster as stern an expression as I could. “If we’re going to live together, I need to know that you can keep a secret. Can you do that?”

 

Her eyes lit up like I told her we were going to shoot bottle rockets under Hank’s door. “Like what? I’m super good at keeping secrets. Like, I’ve never told anyone about my old roommate’s boyfriend from another school that she _totally_ never snuck out to meet.”

 

I put my hands on her shoulders to make sure we kept eye contact. “Jubilee, I need to know that I can trust you. This is a real and very serious secret.”

 

“Dude, it’s a ca-”

 

“He’s not a fucking cat. Can you keep a secret?”

 

“... Yeah,” she answered hesitantly. “Is it a ferret?”

 

I turned my back to reach into my backpack, that had been quietly purring for a while. I turned back to face Jubilee with a small purple noodle-y body balled up in the crook of my elbow. “This is Lockheed. I met him while I was in Japan. We’re bonded with a psychic link.” Lockheed’s big yellow dragon eyes opened as he took in our new roommate.

 

Jubilee’s jaw dropped as she fought every natural instinct to squeal. I couldn’t blame her; Lockheed did that to people. She finally choked out a whisper. “ _That’s a fucking weird ferret._ ”

 

\---

 

Jubilee spent the rest of the night playing with Lockheed the way someone tries to win the favor of a new cat. “So, are dragons just, like, everywhere in Japan, or is he special? What does he eat? Why is he bonded to you? What does that even mean? Is that why you have that tattoo?” She asked a barrage of questions without ever taking her eyes off of him or the cat toy she fashioned out of a shoestring and a butterfly hair clip.

 

“In order: No, dragons are summoned. He’s a patron of the family I worked for while I was there. He eats a lot of things. If he were left to his own devices, he would probably eat bugs or other small animals, but because he’s a spoiled baby, he mostly eats junk food. I keep a bag of shrimp chips with me all the time because those are his favorites, but my friend introduced him to Bugles while we were in Queens. He was entrusted to me originally as a way to communicate remotely with my boss while I was working. My teammates didn’t take to the bonding process, so I was the only choice. And, yeah, the bond is formed by meditating through a traditional tattoo process that hurts like a motherfucker.” I rubbed the tattoo on my left arm absentmindedly, remembering the dull but constant pain. 

 

“What did you do there? Hank said you were in the X-Men before. Were you there doing… X-Men stuff?” She still wouldn’t look up from Lockheed, who was finally showing minimal interest in the hairclip’s spring-based wings.

 

I furrowed my eyebrows as I put another shirt on a hanger. “... Kind of? My mutation lets me move through solid objects, so they thought I would be good at recon work. I got sent over with another member of the team and met up with our third member in the UK en route to Japan. We worked covert ops for a former big time yakuza family. Things went… not great, and the family released me from my contract. So, I came home.” I looked up to see if she had actually heard any of it. Jubilee stared at me with wide eyes and a slack jaw.

 

“Holy shit, are you a ninja?”

 

“Haaaaaaa… no. Technically, no. Ninja aren’t a thing anymore, so officially, no. We weren’t ninjas. Definitely not Logan.” I checked her response out of the corner of my eye. She was still completely locked on, not realizing Lockheed had almost completely destroyed the shoestring. “Look, I don’t really want to talk about it. A lot of bad stuff happened while I was there, and I’m still dealing with it. There’s a lot to process.” I tried to continue unpacking, but talking about Japan meant thinking about Japan. About losing people I cared about.

 

“Okay.” Jubilee shrugged and went back about her business, finally realizing that Lockheed had eaten most of her hairclip.

 

“For real? You promise not to ask about it?”

 

“I can’t promise that, but I can promise I won’t get mad if you tell me to shut up,” she said matter-of-factly as she took the lace out of another shoe to make a new dragon toy.

Maybe this wouldn’t be the worst.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i feel so strongly that kitty and jubilee would have a very close sisterly relationship if marvel weren't cowards and would put them on the same team once in a while


End file.
